Brendan Ryan (Labour)

I have been a Member of this House for over 20 years and have found in that time that Senators are often too defensive about Seanad Éireann. An examination of the campaign for social reform shows that many matters were first discussed in this House at times when they could not have been raised in the other House. The matters to which I refer include controversial topics like divorce and seemingly innocuous topics like the abolition of the status of illegitimacy. Such matters never appeared on the Dáil Order Paper. When the rest of society was moving on, the political process in the Dáil seemed to become stuck in a mid-1950s mood.